Hans Fink

This chapter focuses on the concept of duty, which Løgstrup connects to thinkers such as Kant, Nowell-Smith, and the Stoics, and which he sees as originating from the different kinds of relationships human beings are in with each other, e.g. friendships, marriage, parent–child, employer–worker, etc. Løgstrup argues against Kant that his crude opposition between inclination and duty cannot accommodate the sovereign expressions of life; the latter are more fundamental than duty and duty only enters into the relationship when the sovereign expressions of life somehow fail to be realized.

Løgstrup firstly argues that the differences between the estate-based society of Luther’s time and our modern society mean that we cannot simply apply Luther to today’s problems. Løgstrup turns to specific political issues: state funding of culture, the influence of non-governmental organizations and pressure groups, and the rules of diplomacy in foreign policy. One particular problem related to Luther concerns the right of resistance, since Luther and the Reformers clearly forbade rebellion. But today, due to the structure of power in democracies, we not only have a right of resistance, but a duty to resist oppressors. Løgstrup discusses the problem of how to maintain high standards (e.g. in education and culture) in a democratic society, because democracy involves the risk that the knowledge of experts will be set aside by the will of the uninformed many. Løgstrup also discusses democracy’s risk of becoming a utopian trust in progress and development.

In the first part of this paper, I shall be trying to give an overview of some of the many complexities in our use of the term ‘nature.’ Along the way I shall emphasize a radically anti-dualistic and non-reductive conception of nature that I find it especially important to keep in mind when faced with ecological problems because it may help us avoid common misrepresentations of our own nature and our place in the natural world. Taking this conception to be central amounts to a form of philosophical naturalism, but one which differs from better-known hard and soft versions and could be called absolute naturalism. I shall defend that view in the second part of the paper.

This collection of essays by leading international philosophers considers central themes in the ethics of Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981). Løgstrup was a Lutheran theologian much influenced by phenomenology and by strong currents in Danish culture, to which he himself made important contributions. The essays in What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life are divided into four sections. The first section deals predominantly with Løgstrup’s relation to Kant and, through Kant, the system of morality in general. The second section focuses on how Løgstrup stands in connection with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas. The third section considers issues in the development of Løgstrup’s ethics and how it relates to other aspects of his thought. The final section covers certain central themes in Løgstrup’s position, particularly his claims about trust and the unfulfillability of the ethical demand. The volume includes a previously untranslated early essay by Løgstrup, “The Anthropology of Kant’s Ethics,” which defines some of his basic ethical ideas in opposition to Kant’s. The book will appeal to philosophers and theologians with an interest in ethics and the history of philosophy.

In this paper, I aim to support contextual ethics as a broad and open understanding of ethics and the ethical by commenting on the origin of the words ‘ethics’ and ‘ethical’ in Greek philosophy and on the ambiguities built into them from the beginning. I further list some complexities that arose when the Latinate words ‘morals’ and ‘moral’ began to be used in Roman, medieval and modern philosophy, sometimes as synonyms of and sometimes in contrast to ‘ethics’ and ‘ethical’. Finally, I return to discuss the prospects of contextual ethics in the context of developments in moral philosophy in the twentieth century, adding some pragmatist arguments in its favour.

In "Two sorts of Naturalism" John McDowell is sketching his own sort of naturalism in ethics as an alternative to "bald naturalism". In this paper I distinguish materialist, idealist and absolute conceptions of nature and of naturalism in order to provide a framework for a clearer understanding of what McDowell’s own naturalism amounts to. I argue that nothing short of an absolute naturalism will do for a number of McDowell's own purposes, but that it is far from obvious that this is his position. If he directly denies that it is, he seems to be left with some rather awkward choices.